Missing ticks and a blasted rocket

We hope you had a good day and now we want to give you some exciting information to take with you into the evening. t3n Daily is also available as a podcast and as a newsletter. Here are the topics of the day.

The blue Twitter tick gets a new meaning. Once a symbol of user authenticity, Twitter boss Elon Musk has finally made it the icon for the $8 Twitter Blue subscription by having it removed from all verified accounts.

Twitter Blue subscribers can post longer tweets and videos, get higher ranking priority, and compose benefits such as post-editing and exclusive formatting. In the future, only Blue customers will be allowed to vote in surveys. Twitter has also announced that it will provide customers with additional functions in the future. What they are spared: an identity check. Subscribers only need to provide a phone number.

Companies can, in turn, purchase a golden hook, which currently costs 1,000 euros per month in Europe.

The failed launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket puzzles observers – and fuels speculation. Some suspect Elon Musk forced an early launch because of the special date. We’re talking about April 20, which is written in the US notation “4/20”. 420 is an internet code for smoking marijuana and the day is the scene’s unofficial holiday.

Musk keeps alluding to that number himself. In 2018, he claimed he was considering listing Tesla for $420. The number also occurs at SpaceX: The ship “Ship 20” was stacked on the rocket stage of the Starship “Booster 4”. “Total coincidence,” Musk wrote when asked, but his fans don’t really believe him.

The competition in the AI ​​sector is increasing. Now Stability AI has also announced a large language model. It is called StableLM and is intended to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama and Google’s Lamda. Stability AI has already made a name for itself in the AI ​​world with the AI ​​image generator Stable Diffusion.

Stability AI aims to make AI tools more accessible to the general public. The company has already proven this with Stable Diffusion – and is now doing the same with StableLM. The name stands for a set of open source Large Language Models (LLM). Developers can freely use the ones on GitHub.

The AI ​​is powered by an open-source dataset called Pile, which includes information from a variety of sources, including Wikipedia and Stack Exchange.

The US trading app Robinhood seems to be making another leap to Europe. In 2020 she had already considered the European market, but gave up the expansion plans at the time on the grounds that she would rather concentrate on the core business in the USA.

Now the US fintech is probably starting to expand to Europe again. As the FinanceFWD blog reports, Robinhood is once again looking for a number 1 employee in London to take on the job of Assistant General Counsel, International Retail Brokerage. In addition, Robinhood has already established a Dutch subsidiary that could allow for pan-European expansion.

However, the Robinhood principle is no longer new in Europe: In Germany alone, there is strong competition from Trade Republic and Scalable Capital.

It aims to revolutionize nothing less than mobile computing: an AI-based wearable that has no display. Instead, it has a tiny laser projector and can be operated by voice. Former Apple designer Imran Chaudhri is behind the startup Humane, which has now presented the gadget.

However, little is known about the wearable itself from the official side. According to Chaudhri, it won’t have a wake word like Siri or Alexa. To activate the device and interact with it by voice, tap on it. It also has LED lights that indicate when the microphone is active for listening and when a call is coming in.

More details on the mystery-shrouded startup’s first product will be revealed in the coming months, according to Chaudhri.

That’s it for today’s t3n daily. You can find much more about all aspects of digital life, working life and the future around the clock at t3n.de.